PARTISAN REVIEW
the impenetrability, the rigor of the walls, as at a friend who passes
in the street without a greeting. Once I had seen light moving
insid~
and had pressed my face curiously against the glass doors, but I could
make out no one in the faint glow, only the familiar curve of the
main staircase. An unreasonable kind of jealousy moved me, and I
had remained peering through the doors until someone shouted from
behind me, in a coarSe voice full of the supposed advantage of its
knowledge, "Hey, Bud!
It
don't open on Sundays!" But I had not
even troubled to answer, though, stupidly, he had repeated the words
three times.
As
a matter of fact, I have .always found Sundays difficult. True,
I sleep late, having stayed up for a few drinks after work the night
before. I go alone and never to the same bar two weeks in a row,
but even so, sometimes I have to flee before the sodden confession
of a fellow drinker, the insolent camaraderie of a bartender; one
is
never secure from the .assault of openness, the demand for assent or
sympathy that flourishes everywhere in our world, in the barber chair
or at the counter where one stops to buy a pair of socks.
I wake at noon, go down for a hasty lunch, and return to read
the
New York Times
(we have no decent paper in our city) until
late afternoon, when I walk alone to recapitulate the endless prob–
lems of my work. I explore always those parts of our city most remote
from where I spent my boyhood and where now the children of
those I can remember only as children shriek and fall and run for
comfort into familiar houses. Once a month, however, I go to the
home of my parents to listen to their known reproaches: why am I
not, at my age, married? Why do
I,
an intelligent boy who has gone
to college, work at such a job?
It
is what lowe them, and I pay
the debt precisely, three hours from my greeting until, nodding to
my father, kissing my mother's forehead, I depart, a package of
cookies wrapped in a newspaper in my hand. "He is busy with his
writing," my mother assures my father when I have gone. "Other–
wise he would come oftener. Someday he'll be a Somebody-you'll
see!" And my father, who has said nothing to begin with, of course
does not reply.
But most important of all in my decision to attend that unfor–
tunate meeting was, I am sure, the fact that I had just finished my
second novel and, awaiting the responses of publishers, which to be
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